values and limited government, the right wing’s electoral strategy has become in- creasingly transparent. The GOP is a party devoted to stoking the primal grievances of its base, to transforming politics into an endless culture war, all while doing the bid- ding of corporate donors. In this sense, Donald Trump was nothing more than the logical endpoint of conserva- tism, a nihilistic demagogue who treated the presidency not as a form of public service but as a source of personal power and profit. But Trump’s ascent wasn’t solely the prod- uct of a radicalized Republican party. It also reflected the moral decline of our Fourth Es- tate. In previous decades, a candidate like Trump — that is, a race-baiting troll with no political experience and a long record of failed cons — would have been relegated to the fringes. The 1972 Democratic ticket: Hubert H. Humphrey and George McGovern Photo by Archive Photo/Pictorial Parade/Getty Images “The whole endeavor was half serious and half lark,” the writer John Rothchild told me in 1992. The central premise of my story was that the 1972 conventions served as the unofficial end of the Sixties, when the principled activ- ism of that era gave way to a lassitude that would eventually corrode our political system and mire our citizenry in cynicism. That’s certainly how the Democratic nom- inee George McGovern saw it. “I believe 1972 marked a watershed, in its own way,” he told me. “Had we prevailed, our plan was to strengthen the idealism unleashed in the 1960s, to build upon the progress of the civil rights and antiwar movements and begin to pursue the environmental and women’s causes, which were just starting up. The fail- ure of my campaign took the bloom off the rose of idealism in American politics. It was the final straw. You had Kennedy killed in 1963. Then Johnson led us into the jungles. Then Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were slain. Then McGovern was de- feated in 49 states. By then even those who cared deeply about the country were think- ing, ‘What the hell, why bother? I run into people every day of my life who say that that was the last campaign that they really be- lieved in. I am flattered, of course. But that is really quite sad.” Three decades on from that interview, it’s hard for any citizen of good faith not to share in McGovern’s sorrow. Virtually every one of the legislative and moral achievements that marked the Sixties — from the civil rights movement to the Vot- ing Rights Act, from the Great Society to the guarantee of reproductive rights — has been assaulted, if not reversed. The federal govern- ment, which once devoted its vast resources to waging a War on Poverty, would go on to launch a misguided War on Drugs, followed by an even more disastrous War on Terror. The Watergate scandal that drove Nixon from office in 1974 produced a raft of re- forms intended to curb abuses of power and crack down on the influence of corporations and lobbyists in political life. By 2016, nearly all had been overturned in court or allowed to lapse. For all its sunny rhetoric about family The central premise of my story was that the 1972 conventions served as the unofficial end of the Sixties. Instead, the mainstream media treated him like a frontrunner, slavishly covering his rallies, amplifying his inflammatory rhetoric, pumping the oxygen of attention into his in- coherent campaign. The 2016 election, as you might remember, was marked by an echo of the Watergate break-in that ultimately led Nixon to resign. In this case, the burglars were Russian opera- tives who hacked into DNC email servers, looking for dirt that would help elect the Re- publican candidate. This time around, though, America’s jour- nalists were oddly unconcerned with who had hired the burglars, or why. Instead, they eagerly publicized every scrap of damning material made available to them. The result was a potent smear campaign against the Democratic candidate, engineered by the Kremlin and carried out by our free press. I Glory Days will admit to an extreme personal bias in all this, as well as my own complicity. Af- ter all, I was a child of Watergate. I still remember watching Nixon resign from office, and I shared in the sense of vindication my parents felt. (“They finally got the bastard” were my mom’s exact words.) I read All the President’s Men repeatedly as a young man and went into journalism, driven by the notion that the first duty of the free press was to hold those in power accountable. I also had the good fortune of joining the staff of Miami New Times during the ascent of the paper’s influence. We had a murderer’s row of reporters that included Jim DeFede, Kirk Semple, Kathy Glasgow, and Ben Green- man. Every week, we produced longform sto- ries that sought to expose the corrupt underside of Miami’s political, financial, and legal elite. We were a rambunctious, quirky, and sometimes undisciplined operation. But we also spurred the Miami Herald and other lo- cal media to up their game. Like most other staff writers, I eventually moved on, shipping off to grad school in the mid-’90s and switching my focus to writing fiction. In the months before I left, I remember our former editor-in-chief, Jim Mullin, raving about this new technology, “the internet,” and how it was going to change the journalis- tic and cultural landscape. Mullin was absolutely right, and in ways that would ultimately contribute to the pa- per’s decline. As more and more readers mi- grated online, they turned away from the in-depth investigative and exploratory jour- nalism that drove New Times and other alter- native papers. Why bother flipping the inky pages of a big, bulky tabloid when you could just pop online and “do your own research”? I Preserving Hope realize that I may be sounding my age at this point, voicing complaints about a world that no longer exists. I plead guilty to a certain embittered nostalgia. This was the basic tone of the piece I wrote back in 1992. The full story included a sidebar whose headline says it all: “Look Back in Anguish.” Then again, it’s impossible to read the ac- counts of those who took part in those con- ventions and not lament the state of America in 2022. These days, the most energetic pre- cinct of the “counterculture” is inhabited by white supremacists hopped up on conspiracy theories and eager to subvert democracy. These are the folks ranting about “the sys- tem,” attacking our Capitol, beating on police officers with flagpoles. Their rage isn’t focused on protesting an unconscionable war or attacking the greed that drives the excesses of capitalism. What they want is a “Christian Nationalist” state in which proto-fascist violence and intimidation shove aside free and fair elections. That we have fallen so far away from the basic decency of our founding principles can only be viewed as an ongoing tragedy. To quote McGovern: That is really quite sad. At the same time, I’m trying to preserve my own sense of hope. One thing that helps is to step back from history and consider the role of the individual and, especially, the young citizens who might yet help us right the ship. I’m thinking here of young Mitchell Ka- plan, who was a long-haired 17-year-old back in August of 1972. Kaplan spent the last day of the GOP convention wandering >> p9 27 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | miaminewtimes.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | MIAMI NEW TIMES NEW TIMES MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2008 SEPTEMBER 8-14, 2022
